One of the more interesting events I went to was last weekend (the weekend of the 8th) - I went with a bunch of friends to Amadeus Hack@1050, a hackathon in Waltham hosted by Amadeus.

There weren’t that many people there, but there was a ton of good food. We came in with ideas of what we wanted to work on, and one of the teammembers recommended we build the backend in Rails. We built it, and she had to leave, and then I had to do the rest of the backend work, which ended up being a lot of Javascript logic because I don’t know Rails. I surprised myself, since I don’t know Javascript either, but I ended up getting the APIs working and data sent to the app!

One of the requirements of the apps that we built at the hackathon was to use the Amadeus APIs. We ended up using two - one for flight information, one for car rental information. I haven’t had too much experience with APIs before, but after we got the first one working we were able to do the rest. It just required an AJAX call and using the JSON data in the callback function.

Although we didn’t win anything, I learned a lot about web development at this hackathon. I liked being the main backend developer and trying to solve the problems from a logic perspective, and I had a great time interacting with other developers and designers on my team.

If you’re interested in checking out our project, here’s a slideshow and you can see a live version here (I didn’t come up with that URL...)